CLICK FOR FREE CATALOG OF AUDIO COURSES
Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes
Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables
“There will be more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous people who do not need to repent.” These words of Jesus are well known. They are from his parable of the good shepherd. Are they reasonable? Surely, we think, there should be at least some joy over people who do not need to repent. Indeed, it’s difficult to avoid the thought that the joy over such people should really be greater than that over one repentant sinner. How can Jesus make such an outlandish assertion? In the story Jesus also asks a rhetorical question which assumes agreement: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and having lost one, would not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one lost sheep?” Would a prudent shepherd really do that? Wouldn’t that risk turning a misfortune (the loss of one sheep) into disaster (the dispersal and possible loss of the whole flock)? Fr. John Jay Hughes deals with these questions in the third talk, “Joy in Heaven,” in his audio course A Journey Through the Parables. He also points out a little known feature of the story: the people to whom it was first addressed would have received a jolt at finding that the central figure in the story was a shepherd. They would have been similarly jolted by the central figure in the story which immediately follows, about the woman looking for her lost coin. These seemingly simple stories are more complex than they appear at first sight.